Watching Farscape

So I've tried a bunch of times to watch Farscape, including...

• Its first run in Australia, where I bailed sometime during the pilot
• Later in that season, with the episode starring Ben Browder's wife as a nice lady who eats people's bones -- notable primarily for the fact that my adoptive grandmother turned up uninvited halfway through and went off about how anyone who can imagine something as grotesque as an alien has something wrong with them...
• The heavily bowdlerised versions that ran in a kiddy timeslot one summer, in which "Crackers Don't Matter" was cut down to a nonsensical 20 minutes
• With my BFF and her then-flatmate, where I got most of the way through season one and had a lot of feelings about Crais

Anyway, I am TRYING AGAIN! This time my flatmate (who has seen the whole series) is advising which episodes to skip, so we've gotten halfway through season 2 in just a couple of weeks.

My feelings, in no particular order: 

• Claudia Black is a national treasure and we are lucky to have her
• I still have a lot of feelings about Crais and feel like Lani Tupu has been forgotten as an early and iconic Space Pacifika
• I feel like this is the missing link between Babylon 5 and the Doctor Who revival, and also Killjoys
• Ben Browder is very attractive and charming and I kind of hate Crichton
• This show is SO rapey
• Like, not just Moya's pregnancy (and could the Leviathan 'gods' BE more victim-blamey?) but the scene in "Crackers Don't Matter" where Crichton threatens to rape Chiana???
• Maybe there was something to be said for that 20-minute edit...
• There's paranoia and irrationality and then there's ... that
• And generally I LIKE that this is a show about irredeemable assholes in space, and also Aeryn Sun, Who Has Done Nothing Many Things Wrong In Her Entire Life But Is Trying To Get Better, BUT...
• I'm normally into an age-gap, but Chiana is a TEENAGER and D'Argo is ... what, late 20s, early 30s? This is an r/relationships post waiting to happen
• Aeryn and Crichton have amazing chemistry, but I feel like Aeryn could do better
• I'd be into Zhaan except I'm constantly worrying about the state of Virginia Hey's kidneys, and also she's basically What If Delenn But Blue
• This is SUCH a product of Sydney in the early 2000s: cheap, glossy, tacky yet appealing, full of women wearing low-cut pants and no eyeliner (see also: The Matrix and sequels, the Star Wars prequels)
• A useful rule of thumb: the more episodes of A Country Practice an actor has been in, the better they are. Except this is obviously fake because Claudia Black was only in one season of ACP -- she was one of the young actors brought in to sex up the abortive Channel 10 reboot -- and YET...
• There is so much no-homo and use of words like "slut" and "bitch", and I can't believe we took this for granted in the early '00s, but I also can't believe I'm looking forward to escaping to the relatively peaceful setting of, uhhhhhh, Star Trek: Enterprise
• Aeryn wears a leather vest with no shirt or bra, and low-cut leather pants, and I cannot believe we used to do this to women
• Except I can, because the other day I saw a teenage girl wearing camo cargo pants and a satin camisole, and I know what comes next...

I guess it sounds like I'm not having fun? I absolutely am, but then the episode ends and I go, "Oh. Oh dear." Mostly I'm in it for the Auscore, for appreciating the quality of the costume design in the face of budget limitations and also the early '00s, and for Claudia Black and Lani Tupu.